Writing Activity

&#x200b; N. Katherine Hayles is concerned that the increasing disconnect between digital media scholars and traditional (i.e. print-based) scholars will lead to significant losses in knowledge: Print-based scholars would become increasingly marginalized, unable to communicate not only with Digital Humanities colleagues but also with researchers in the social sciences and sciences, who routinely use digital…

From Hayles: Refractory elements that must be subordinated in verbal presentation for an argument to make sense and be compelling can now be given weight in their own right. (4) This provides an interesting contrast to Sarah Allen’s work in the argumentative bias.

In writing these blog posts, I find that I’m not doing the kind of simultaneous reading and quoting that I imagined I would be doing. Instead, I find myself doing free association, drawing in examples from memory that I’ve read over the past few years (or longer). Clearly, the brain (as a technology) is capable…

i just replaced my iPhone. Suddenly, apps now open when I press the icon. They stay open while I’m walking to my car. Then, too, I finally figured out cross-linking in WordPress. Now I can write posts that link directly to the other posts I’m thinking about. This might save me a lot of time…

So in reviewing the “state of the blog,” so-to-speak, I’m finding that the issue of automatic backup is something I didn’t adequately account for. Google Docs automatically backs up everything in a nice, tidy format – the format I typed it in. And then I use Syncdocs to automatically back up my documents from the…

While posting to Tumblr last night, I noticed that the articles I was posting were really, really drawing me in. But I wasn’t researching writing – I was researching and writing about public perceptions of autism, and hacking of government personnel files, and the story of a young boy with Sanfilippo Syndrome, and police brutality…

HubPages offers a unique hybrid of social media and blogging (somewhat akin to Tumblr), but it enforces strict community guidelines that can place added burden on the author. It could be a great teaching resource, but I caution against it after the following experiences: When I recently logged in, I discovered that all of my…

Back in Spring 2012, I was one of the instructors who took part in the ISU Writing Program’s program-wide assessment. (Here’s a link to the PDF Report, in case the blog article moves.) It was a pretty in-depth look at the program, so I’m sharing the link to it here. It’s a walk down memory…

J.K. Rowling, in an interview, said she took extensive notes on Hogwarts and her characters, but that these notes were for her rather than for her readers. At Computers and Writing last week, I realized that my best Twitter posts came when I replaced my standard note-taking in Google Docs with pure Twitter. Since I…

Although Berlin heavily criticizes the cognitivist approach, I find some aspects of it to very closely fit my own experiences with writing. Flower and Hayes break down composition into three stages of mental processes: “the planning stage…generating, organizing, and goal setting; the translating stage, the point at which thoughts are put into words; and the…